DMA-BUF With V4L2 Is Still A Work In Progress

Work on integrating support for DMA-BUF to import and export buffers from the Linux kernel V4L2 stack is still a work in progress.

For several months there's been developers at Linaro and other organizations (primarily the ARM SoC vendors) working on integrating videobuf2 with DMA-BUF. This work comes down to being able to import and export buffers via DMA-BUF to/from the V4L2 stack, so that buffers could be easily shared with the DRM drivers and other kernel subsystems in an effective manner.

While we're now into the Linux 3.7 kernel merge window, this DMA-BUF/V4L2 work is still maturing. The ninth revision to these patches were published a few days ago and are still actively being discussed on the mailing lists.

This latest revision to the videobuf2 integration with DMA-BUF patches re-base the code on the new Linux 3.6 kernel, add in new support, fix various bugs, and bring in various other minor enhancements. While the work has yet to be merged, at least there's other recent new Video 4 Linux 2 features.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.